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James Parton, the owner of the history magazine American Heritage, was appalled by the permissiveness of Webster's Third, published in 1961, and tried to buy the G. and C. Merriam Company so he could undo the changes. When that failed, he contracted with Houghton to publish a new dictionary. The AHD was edited by William Morris and relied on a usage panel of 105 writers, speakers, and eminent persons chosen for their well-known conservatism in the use of language.[1] However, Morris made inconsistent use of the panels, often ignoring their advice and inserting his own opinions.[1]

The AHD broke ground among dictionaries by using corpus linguistics for compiling word-frequencies and other information. It took the innovative step of combining prescriptive information (how language should be used) and descriptive information (how it actually is used). The descriptive information was derived from actual texts.

The members of the panel are sent regular ballots asking about matters of usage; the completed ballots are returned and tabulated, and the results form the basis for special usage notes appended to the relevant dictionary entries. In many cases, these notes not only report the percentage of panelists who consider a given usage or construction to be acceptable, but will also report the results from balloting of the same question in past decades, to give a clearer sense of how the language changes over time.

The AHD is also somewhat innovative in its liberal use of photographic illustrations, which at the time was highly unusual for general reference dictionaries, many of which went largely or completely unillustrated. It also has an unusually large number of biographical entries for notable persons.

The first edition appeared in 1969, highly praised for its Indo-Europeanetymologies. In addition to the normally expected etymologies, which for instance trace the word ambiguous to a Proto-Indo-Europeanrootag-, meaning "to drive," the appendices included a seven-page article by Professor Calvert Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and "Indo-European Roots", 46 pages of entries that are each organized around one of some thousand Proto-Indo-European roots and the English words of the AHD that are understood to have evolved from them. These entries might be called "reverse etymologies": the ag- entry there, for instance, lists 49 terms derived from it, words as diverse as agent, essay, purge, stratagem, ambassador, axiom, and pellagra, along with information about varying routes through intermediate transformations on the way to the contemporary words.

The second edition, published in 1980, omitted the Indo-European etymologies, but they were reintroduced in the third edition, published in 1992. The third edition was also a departure for the publisher because it was developed in a database, which facilitated the use of the linguistic data for other applications, such as electronic dictionaries.